John Simon, Truth,
Lies & Hearsay: A Memoir of a Musical Life in and out of Rock and Roll
(The Author, 2018), 87.
Over the years, the Grammy organization has presented
me with a few frames containing records coated with certain precious metals,
gold being the most common. When I actually put my first one, for [producing Simon
& Garfunkel’s] “Bookends” on the turntable, I discovered that the label
bearing the title of the album I worked on had been pasted on an Andy Williams
Christmas Album.
[Often RIAA gold records did not in fact correspond to
the actual LP displayed in the frame. Many of the stories about artists discovering
their gold records are someone else’s concern youth-oriented musicians who are
amused or affronted that the fraudulent artifact is by an older, less hip
artist. See, for example, the following anecdote by the drummer for The Doors.]
John Densmore, Riders
on the Storm: My Life with Jim Morrison and the Doors (Delta, 1991), 226-7.
A week later Julia and I were back in L.A., and the abortion seemed pretty much in
the past. I was playing records when I noticed something odd about the gold
album I had just received for Waiting for
the Sun.
"Hey, this isn't our third album!"
"How can you tell?" Julia inquired.
"The number of songs on the label doesn't match
up to the number of songs on the disk! Wait a minute...let me see...'Love Street' is
about three minutes long, and there's no
way it could fit into this tiny bandwidth! This song looks like it's under
two minutes."
"Can you open it?" Julia asked. Her eyes
widened.
"I'll have to break the glass. It's sealed."
I grinned at the prospect of smashing the front glass.
Julia nodded her encouragement.
After getting a hammer from the kitchen, I took the
gold record outside to the trash cans. I leaned the frame over one of the cans
and tapped hard on the glass. It broke and I carefully pulled out the record,
making sure there wasn't any broken glass stuck to it. I brought it back inside
to the turntable.
"This thing is really flimsy! It isn't a real
record...some kind of pressing...I wonder if it will play?" I put the
needle down on the first cut, and through lots of audio crackling we could hear
a large orchestra with someone reciting poetry.
"It's Rod
McKuen! It's fucking Rod McKuen!"
"That's funny." Julia laughed. "Why do
you think they did it?"
I laughed uproariously, yet at the same time I felt
insulted. "I don't believe it. They're too cheap to spend five or six
bucks on the real thing. So they just get an old $1.98 Thrifty Drug Store
discount bin record and schlock it with fake gold, stick a new label on it and
slam it into a frame! God damn."
Another myth shattered.
